An article from the Reader’s Digest book - Strange Stories, Amazing Facts of America's Past

The Rogerenes

John Rogers and his followers fought for religious freedom.

Many American colonies were founded for the sake of religious freedom, but most were concerned only with their own freedom.  Few tolerated dissenters.  But John Rogers, born into a wealthy Connecticut merchant family in 1648, was one early American who took a stand for the basic principle of religious freedom.  As a result, he spent years in jail, endured public whippings, and lost most of his property through fines.

Believing that Christians were answerable to God alone, Rogers opposed salaried clergy, meeting-houses, and formal prayers.  He freed his slaves and refused to take medicines, trusting in prayer and anointment with oil.  Above all, he held that state-enforced religious laws were invalid and advocated passive resistance to them.

But he and his followers, the Rogerenes, weren't always passive.  They had a knack for dramatic public protest.  Sometimes they would simply enter a meeting-house and sit through the service with their hats on.  On other occasions, they became more extreme.

"The madness, immodesty and tumultuous conduct of Rogers and those who followed him, at this day, is hardly conceivable," fumed the flagrantly biased historian Benjamin Trumbull a century later, in his A Complete History of Connecticut.  "It seemed to be their study and delight to violate the sabbath, insult magistrates and ministers, and to trample on all law and authority, human and divine.  They would come, on the Lord's day, into the most public assemblies nearly or quite naked, and...behave in a wild and tumultuous manner, crying out, and charging the most venerable ministers with lies and false doctrines."

Trumbull's outrage was based on exaggeration, but the fact remains that Rogers was tried and convicted of everything from entertaining two Quakers in his home to burning a New London meeting-house.  He was imprisoned seven times, for a total of 15 years, and once received 76 stripes, or lashes, for blasphemy.  Many of his followers, men and women alike, were publicly stripped and whipped or tarred and feathered.  In 1677 a court ordered that Rogers be fined 5 pounds every month no matter what he did.

When his first wife divorced him, Rogers declared that neither marriage nor divorce laws had any validity.  Later, since he considered himself still married in the eyes of God, he tried, unsuccessfully, to kidnap his wife from the bed of her new husband.

He eventually took a second wife, without the formality of a wedding.  She was more to his liking, as she demonstrated by dumping a pot of scalding water from a second-story window onto a constable who had come around to collect some fees.  But when she was convicted of bearing Rogers's child out of wedlock and was given the choice of leaving him or receiving 40 stripes for the offense, she left him.

Rogers eventually pushed his belief in God's protection too far.  In 1721, at the age of 72, he traveled to Boston during a smallpox epidemic and visited the sick, as was his habit.  Returning home to New London, he died of the disease within a few days.

Long after Rogers's death, the Rogerenes persisted with his war to separate church and state.  The group petered out in the 19th century, but by then their efforts in Connecticut had long since borne fruit in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.